Need Help with Google Analytic Reporting - Landing Pages

[shaunm]

Hi All,

I'm seeing a completely strange problem. Google analytic is reporting traffic for landing pages ending with extensions such as .html but these pages aren't on the server. Not sure why Google analytic is reporting like this while Google webmaster tools reports correctly. Have you faced such an issue, what could be the problem?

The actual pages on the Website is something like this

example.com while GA reports for example.com/index.html
example.com/somepage while GA reports for example.com/somepage.html

Like the above almost all the pages are appended with .html at the end of the URL as per the GA landing page report goes.

Thanks for the help!

[netmeg]

Do you have your redirects set up properly? You might also want to double check how they're indexed in Google.

[shaunm]

Thanks @netmeg,

The redirects are set up properly since long back or at least when we found this issue.

Google doesn't have any of these URLs with extensions in its index but it still reports traffic for them.

[netmeg]

I'd double check with a tool like HTTP Live Headers that the html version is being 301'd to the directory version.

If you are absolutely 300% sure that there's nothing technically wrong with the site, you can chop off the .html in Analytics with a filter. But that's not going to keep it from showing up there in the first place; personally I've never seen this happen when there wasn't a redirect issue of some kind.

Is it possible there's some links out there that point to the .html versions?

[shaunm]

I'd double check with a tool like HTTP Live Headers that the html version is being 301'd to the directory version.

Thanks. I've checked and found them all redirecting properly to the directory version.

But that's not going to keep it from showing up there in the first place; personally I've never seen this happen when there wasn't a redirect issue of some kind.

Yeah, that's completely strange!

Is it possible there's some links out there that point to the .html versions?

I've run it through the crawler tools and found no pages such as .html being linked internally. I checked with Google webmaster tool to see if they are receiving internal links and found nothing there as well.

I also done a Moz OSE backlink check to see if these pages are linked from any external websites.

None of the analysis returned anything and made me stand without any idea about what's actually happening!

[netmeg]

Well, then I got nothing. Sorry. Never seen a situation like that.

[trabis]

If you are running a php site then go to Google Analytics->Admin->Profile Settings and change default page from index.html to index.php

[shaunm]

Well, then I got nothing. Sorry. Never seen a situation like that.

:-)

If you are running a php site then go to Google Analytics->Admin->Profile Settings and change default page from index.html to index.php

How do you say that can solve the problem? As per Google, you have to enter your default page that the server is loading when your domain is typed into an address bar. Say example.com/index.html is loading when example.com is typed into the browser, then your default page is index.html.

It's not the case with me. No such page as that is loading. Also, it's a .Net site which used to be a wordpress(php) site once.


Thanks,

[trabis]

I saw silimar problem on stackoverfow. The user migrated from html to php but analytics kept assuming the site was found under index.html

Please take a look. Instead of using index.php just leave the field empty

[lucy24]

It sounds as if GA is reporting information from the actual, physical page that the GA code is located on, rather than the URL the user sees. That's assuming your "real" pages are pagename.html, index.html and so on, even if the user is never allowed to see it in the URL.

It may not even be a problem, unless it's listing two-or-more forms for the same page. Has there been a recent change in the underlying GA code? Got a vague idea someone, somewhere was talking about this...